The rollicking comedies of Plautus, who brilliantly adapted Greek plays for Roman audiences c. 205–184 BCE, are the earliest Latin works to survive complete and are cornerstones of the European theatrical tradition from Shakespeare and Molière to modern times.

This first volume of a new Loeb Classical Library edition of all twenty-one of Plautus’s extant comedies presents Amphitruo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, and Captivi with freshly edited texts, lively modern translations, and ample explanatory notes. Accompanying the plays is a detailed introduction to Plautus’s œuvre as a whole, discussing his techniques of translation and adaptation, his use of Roman humor, stage conventions, language and meter, and his impact on the Greco-Roman comedic theater and beyond.

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Now Available: The digital Loeb Classical Library (loebclassics.com) extends the founding mission of James Loeb with an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature.

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What we might think of as “Hall’s Dilemma”—the challenge of keeping people from investing meaning into “race” as a category of biological difference, based on superficial differences visible to the eye—is as old as some of the earliest European encounters with “the other” in Africa and the New World in the modern period (beginning five hundred years ago), when differences of culture and phenotype soon fused with economic desire and exploitation to produce “the African” as a new and mostly negative signifier. And for centuries, this toxic compound has played into our very human instinct for defining ourselves through some of our most obvious, often “measurable” diffe…